Injury-plagued Sharks heading to Minnesota without Nabokov or Blake — plus a Wild note or two

That’s the word from my colleague Mark Emmons, who covered this morning’s skate while I filled out expense forms here in my hotel room (see yesterday’s posting). Very glad to have him tag-teaming our coverage these days.

Bottom line is that it looks as if last week’s statements on Nabokov’s condition turned out to be overly optimistic, though Coach Todd McLellan did qualify everything by saying Mother Nature would have the final say as to when his No. 1 goalie returns.

Blake was having his “lower extremity” examined after he was struck by a slap shot in the back of his foot or leg on the same play in which Joe Thornton scored late in the second period of Saturday night’s 3-1 loss to Vancouver. Blake came back for one shift in the third, then realized he wasn’t able to keep going.

Among the other injured, only Marcel Goc made the trip, but McLellan told Emmons that Goc wasn’t a sure thing for Tuesday night’s game against the Wild.

Here’s the rest of what Mark passes along:

The lines at practice were the same ones that finished the game against the Canucks:

Things were a little less clear on defense, though McLellan did have Blake’s usual partner, Marc-Edouard Vlasic paired with Alexei Semenov. And you can expect to see Christian Ehrhoff back in the lineup.

Here’s McLellan’s comment on his forward lines:

“With the bodies that we have out right now, we’d like to find a way to play four lines. The problem we have right now is that we’re burning players out. We’re really thinned out on centers, and the only option we have is to put Patty back there. It doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way. It won’t hurt us to have guys play with others prior to the playoffs.”

Here’s what Nabokov, who worked individually with asst GM and goalie coach Wayne Thomas on the ice this morning, had to say about his situation:

“It’s better, but obviously it’s going to take a couple more days to get 100 percent, and that’s my goal — make sure it’s 100 percent when I step back on the ice. I’m taking it day-by-day. I’m seeing improvements.”

Does he have a timetable?

“I don’t want to give any time frame because you really don’t know.”

Frustration?

“It’s not easy. I never like to watch hockey. It sucks.”

******Wild tough guy Derek Boogard is eligible to play Tuesday night, having served his five-game suspension for an elbow to the head of Calgary’s Brandon Prust, but Coach Jacques Lemaire was hedging Sunday as to whether he’d insert his tough guy in the lineup against the Sharks, telling reporters that, in Boogard’s absence, “we werent’ being pushed around, you know?”

Boogard, on the other hand, said he thought other teams were taking advantage of his absence by playing a more physical game against the Wild.

******Former Sharks captain Owen Nolan was the featured player in a TV spot last night called “The Penalty Box,” where he had to answer a bunch of rapid-fire questions, many of them not related to hockey. Among the things we learned: the comic-book hero he’d want to be is Spiderman, his hockey hero growing up in Southern Ontario was Buffalo’s Gilbert Perrault, and his first car was a Porsche.

Nolan, by the way, is going by his original NHL nickname these days: Cowboy. That was the tag he said he got playing for Quebec and the one that the French players on the Wild have been using since he got here. In San Jose, he was Buster.

David Pollak

David Pollak has been following the NHL forever and at the Mercury News as an editor or reporter since 1987. For almost a decade he wrote about the Sharks as the paper's Fan in the Stands before joining the sports department in 2001. He became the Sharks beat writer before the 2007-08 season and began this blog at that time. You can also follow him on Twitter at @PollakOnSharks.